Daniel T. Mills

Director of the Bates College Museum of Art and Lecturer in the Humanities

Associations

About

Topics that captivate Dan Mills include cartography and other systems of visualizing and codifying information, history and current events, satire and humor. He began to incorporate collage, and with it maps, into his work in the early 1990s. The catalyst for this was the quincentennial of the event euphemistically referred to as The First Encounter, or The Discovery of the New World, When Columbus Discovered America, among other things, and his growing desire to visually explore this and other periods of history through his art. Since that time, he has made work about history and colonization in painting/collages on large roll-down school maps, about imperialism by creating an atlas reconfiguring the world, and more recently, he has been using maps as a space to visualize data about current wars and conflicts. Mills works in various media including painting, collage, mixed media, and sculptural installations.

Mills has had solo shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, NIU Art Museum Gallery in Chicago, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum in China, George Billis Gallery in New York, Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica, Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago. Group exhibitions include Dissident Futures at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; Lines in the Earth: Maps, Power and the Imagination, Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, ID; Misleading Trails (traveled internationally); Party Headquarters: Voting is Just the Beginning at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; and Remix: Selections from the International College Center (traveling nationally). Collections include the British Library, John D. & Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, New York, Library of Congress, and UCLA. In 2009, Perceval Press published Dan Mills, The US Future States Atlas.

Mills has been a museum director for over twenty years and curator for over thirty years. He was appointed director of the Bates College Museum of Art and Lecturer in the Humanities in 2010. His curatorial projects have traveled throughout the US and to China. (For more, see Curatorial above).

Born in Upstate New York, Mills is the son of E. Andrew and Virginia Ward Mills, painters who lived and worked in Upstate New York and Cape Cod. He grew up in Schenectady, graduated with a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, and MFA from Northern Illinois University. He was active as artist/curator in Chicago for fifteen years, then he and his wife, artist Gail Skudera, returned to the Northeast in the mid-1990s. They live and work in Maine, where Mills is director of the Bates College Museum of Art and Lecturer in the Humanities. Mills is represented by George Billis Gallery, New York, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago.